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    Visio Impact - Issue 1
     

    See What’s New ›

    Depending upon where you live you’re hopefully enjoying either the last days of winter or summer, and perhaps trying to sneak in a last trip to the beach or to the mountains before a new season is upon us. Here at Microsoft Visio, we’re similarly keeping an anticipatory eye on the future, but firmly standing with both feet planted (our toes in the sand or our skates on the ice, if you will) in the here and the now.

    		    
      It is with this approach that we’re launching Visio Impact, a monthly newsletter intended for Visio users. With millions of people now using Visio 2010, and the global Visio ecosystem in full swing creating new Visio 2010-related resources, we thought now was a great time to provide Visio users with a filter for the best and latest information on how to get the most out of a product that you probably already rely upon or would like to rely upon as an important professional tool.

    At the same time, Visio Impact represents a bet we’re making about our collective future. We think that we, the Microsoft Visio team, have a role to play in helping to empower, grow, and learn from the diverse community of Visio users like you. To help define this future, every month we’ll try to surface new and evolving concepts and insights that we hope will help you imagine specific new ways to efficiently employ Visio to have more impact and solve more challenges.

    Please let us know if you’ve got suggestions or thoughts on future topics or how we can make the newsletter better.


    		 
      - The Microsoft Visio Team


    		 
     
    Product Tips

    A big focus in the development of Visio 2010 was improving the product’s ease of use and making it simple for users to tap into Visio’s rich feature set to get things done. The software developers on our team, the ones who actually write the Visio software, recently published a great blog post where they highlight some of our favorite tips and tricks for Visio 2010 users. Via this “how to” post, you’ll learn to:
    • Quickly create evenly spaced shapes
    • Keep shapes aligned
    • Select an overlapped shape
    • Reset a connector
    • Add and position connector text
    • Create connections that reposition dynamically
    • Drag AutoConnect arrows
    • Collapse the shapes window

    		  




    Favorite Tips and Tricks ›     		 
      Template of the Month

    This IT Asset Management template combines shapes from the “Detailed Network Diagram” and “Rack Diagram” templates that are included in Visio 2010. This template was created for users who work in either a central IT or operations department or support a Line-of-Business. It provides an example, including hypothetical data connections and data graphics parameterized to update with changes to underlying data, of how to use Visio to monitor status relating to deployment, configuration, and usage of different IT hardware assets, such as workstations, web servers, and database servers. A US-units version and a Metric-unit version are available for free download.

    		 




    		 
     
    Spotlight - Visio MVP, David Parker

    		 
       

    		  Microsoft Visio benefits from having a thriving global community of independent Visio MVPs. The first Visio 2010-related book to be published is by Visio MVP, David Parker. His book highlights a common challenge and a high impact opportunity for most organizations- creating, managing, and improving human and document-centric processes and workflows. Parker’s book is titled Business Process Diagramming and Validation and offers an in-depth guide on how to effectively use and customize the business process, workflow, and validation features of Visio Premium 2010.


    		 
     
    News/Trends

    The Register, a UK-based IT news site, has initiated a series of 12 articles spotlighting “Data Visualisation”. The first article in the series, titled, Saying It with Pictures: We’re Bigging Up Diagramming and Visualisation Tools was published on February 21 and features significant Visio-related commentary from MVPs like David Parker and Chris Roth. We look forward to future installments and hope to see more perspectives and ideas on how tools like Visio can be used to create value for organizations and users.


    		 
     
    Did You Know?

    		 
       





    		  recently launched enterprise communications software. We are happy to announce that the Lync team offers a free download that incorporates Visio 2010. The Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Planning Tool asks users a series of questions and then uses these answers to recommend a communications topology that gets automatically generated as very detailed and yet clear and graphically-appealing Visio diagrams.

    We were excited to try the wizard data entry interface and then see what a diagram highlighting “concurrent PSTN calls connecting through central sites” actually looked like and our expectations were exceeded. Whether you’re interested in planning a new communications network or more interested in seeing how to input data via the tool to create impressive Visio communications network diagrams, the free download is here.


    		 
     
    If you would like to get the newsletters when it comes out, here is the subscription link.